AI is pretty much done. Will have to tweak it as I introduce different vehicles; i.e. some can turn on the spot, some can't.

Here, the purply circle is the tank's "patrol zone". If you're anywhere near the tank, but it can't see you, it moves to a position within it's own zone where it can see you. If you duck out of sight, it'll move again. If it can't see you from anywhere in it's patrol area, it'll just sit there til you make a move.

The red square is the calculated path's start position, and the black square is a navigation node. Here there's just one as it's a direct line, but it uses Unity's native NavMesh system (with underlying A*) to calculate paths around objects. You can have it automatically make an object follow a path by use of NavMeshAgents, but I've opted to just use the naviation path, and use my own code to move stuff along paths. There's more flexibility that way.

Might be! At this stage it's about cramming in as much flexibility as possible. Some enemies will be easy pickings, others will be deadly. And the cool part is they're all powered by the same code, just with different parameters fed to it.

Got to add gamepad support anyway, even for the PC brigade. Not sure how at this stage as I'm trying to avoid Unity's Input Manager as it doesn't let you remap key bindings at runtime. Thus far there doesn't seem to be a way of handling joystick input without it.

At least we've got more-or-less standardised controllers, nowadays. Even the Switch's individual joycons have at least an analogue stick, two shoulder buttons and four face buttons.
If you could aim for that, but with bonus buttons when available, that should suffice for most systems.

I'm sure the Unity people have already thought of most of this, to be honest. It's just that.... I dunno... without having tried adding any gamepad support as yet, the solution isn't exactly presenting itself very well. Given that the helicopter controls are done, it's probably something I should tackle before much longer, and hopefully it'll all become clear. :/

That's a good start, but I'd also mention anal retentives - they're the ones that know everything about everything and if you get something wrong - eg the "blast radius is too small" or "bomb crater would be deeper" - then they'll happily tell the world that "THIS GAME SUXXORZ R3AL B4D."

Well... the helicopter isn't an AH-64 - it's more of a hybrid RAH-66 with AH-64 weapons config, but neither the AH-64 or the RAH-66 has retractable landing gear. In short it isn't a helicopter that exists in the real world so it wouldn't make sense to have real world weapons.

Also, it wont be taking place in any specific theatre which gives me freedom to base enemy tanks on anything I want - not specifically Iraqi, Russian, Afghan etc. The tanks so far are modeled from real ones but I'll call them something else.

Plus... yeah I don't want to go down the road of arguing about mundane things like the elevation rate of a Topol missile launcher. If it ain't called Topol, there's no case to argue.

This bad bastard carries eight SA-19 SAMs as well as a 30mm dual-barreled cannon - employing the multiple-weapons-per-vehicle I was on about before.

Question tho... should it fire the eight missiles it's got, then that's it? Or should it have unlimited ones? It's cannons are unlimited but I'm not sure on the missiles. Makes it more deadly if they're unlimited, but on the other hand if it has limited missiles, you can get it to fire them all before going in for the kill.

The missiles are contained in launch tubes so it wouldn't look massively odd if they were unlimited.

I'm for the limited ammo option - it always pisses me off when a game limits your ammo/fuel etc. but not the enemy's. You can get them to refill at a (unlimited) supply depot then re-deploy. Then you get the best of both worlds.

I'm all for suspension of reality, but I'm pretty sure that little army dudes running around mid-battle, carrying eight 30KG rockets with an armed vicious bastard helicopter swooping down overhead, might be a step too far.

Decided that before I go much further, as it's all getting rather complicated, I should go over what I've done so far and make notes of every parameter etc I need to set up per vehicle within Unity. Vehicles are generally made of three components; a chassis, at least one turret, and at least one barrel per turret. In addition, each 'barrel' can be either a cannon, or represent some sort of missile launcher. There can be multiple turrets per chassis, and multiple barrels per turret.

This is page one. There's a few on page two, as well. Still need to add in support for making the left/right wheels rotate/turn but since I'm currently working with the 2K22 Tunguska, which doesn't have a proper texture so you can't see the wheels rotating, and they don't turn as they run on tracks, I'll get to that later.

Spent two fucking hours wondering why the tank refuses to shoot the player when the helicopter is above the tank. Gun barrel was being reported as 20° away from it's target, when it only fires within 5°. Yet it was visibly pointing directly at the target. WTAF??

Took me all that time to realise that on a dual-barrel cannon like the 2K22 has, the barrel offset from the turret makes a MASSIVE difference - big enough to make the difference between firing and NOT firing, and this becomes more pronounced when there isn't a lot of planar difference between the position of the player and the tank. Once I realised what the problem was, ten-second fix.

Basically, when you blow stuff up, rigidbodies are enabled and Unity's physics engine takes over with an explosion force applied from below. On lighter vehicles (this is a 6 metric tonne Ural), they can go flying upside down, whereas a 40-tonne tank will barely rock on it's wheels.

I've done that to myself today... Plugged the HDMI cable into the back of the PC, "No signal" showing up on the tele... Thought "Shite", give everything a wiggle, nowt, put HDMI cable out, then in, then out, shaked it all about... Still nowt... Check my HDMI splitter, then the tele, check the source... All that bollocks!

Scratching my head looking down, it dawned on me, I never actually plugged the HDMI cable on the graphics card, I shoved it in the onboard one... D'oh!!!